Wednesday, May 17, 2017

I’m
a genius! I know because I just took a test on Face Book and they told
me so!

The
post in my feed said, “Only a genius can see the hidden figure!”
then showed a number written in salmon colored, globule style patches
on a speckled green background. I saw it immediately, so, to
establish my undoubted intellectual superiority over those who couldn’t see the number, I quickly clicked on the link,
and lo and behold, the genius that I must be, I got sucked down the
rabbit hole of click-bait.

Oh,
not the insidious ads that pop up on your screen every search you do,
magically presenting your old searches so you can’t possibly
continue without some interaction on my part. You know, like clicking
on whatever pops up just to see what colors they have. No. I’m
talking about click bait. Those are the feeds and sidebars that catch
your eye that usually state, “You won’t believe what...”
followed by something based on your past searches. Or the other perennial favorite,"Thirty-seven images you won't believe..."

Trust me, ain’t
nothing accidental in the Internet wonderland.

One
of the most common bait for clicktraps is the fourth grade English
test passed off as “Only one in 100 can pass this test!” then
they give you a sentence where their, they’re or there is the
proper answer to a meaningless question. I always love to see tests I
had to pass to get into Junior High School being passed off as
intellectual prowess! Good ol’ Southwest High School. Or was it
West Miami Jr High? Maybe it was Olympia Heights elementary! I
remember Mr. White in sixth grade explaining gerunds, and Mrs.
Saunders in tenth grade trying to unravel the three year reign of
confusion with a frustrating but memorable lesson on present
participles.

Amazing,
I can conjugate a verb – within reason – and always remember
loose with two “Ohs” is the opposite of tight! Hey, I nail quite
a few of those tests, and even share the results with thousands and
thousands of new fans around the world.

“Clickbait-
is a pejorative term
for web content that is aimed at generating online
advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or
accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines or
eye-catching thumbnail pictures to
attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the
material over online social networks.[ Clickbait headlines
typically aim to exploit the "curiosity gap", providing
just enough information to make readers curious, but not enough
to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked
content.”

"From a
historical perspective, the techniques employed by clickbait authors
can be considered derivative of yellow journalism, which
presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead
uses eye-catching headlines that include exaggerations of
news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism”

My
very favorite click-bait, though is the first one, where color vision
is misrepresented to represent intelligence instead of visual acuity.
Since – or is it sense – I have 100 percent color accuracy, I got
to twist wires together for the Air Force and later a computer
manufacturing company that no longer needs people like me since they
no longer make computers.

Regardless
– or is it irregardless, since that strange aberration has now
been added to Webster’s Dictionary as a real word – geniuses with
my native ability have been relegated to taking meaningless tests on
Face book and supplying data mining companies around the world of our
likes and dislikes, much less our friend’s lists and all their –
or is it they’re? - contact info.